As I sat here this Memorial Day weekend working homework problems, I also thought about what this holiday means here in the US. For some, it may just be a long weekend away from work, but it’s really about remembering the soldiers who never returned home from all the various wars, soldiers who sacrificed their lives to save their brothers-in-arms next to them on the battlefield; soldiers who paid with their lives for the ultimate good of their fellow Americans back home; soldiers who often died trying to protect people they didn’t even know in other countries. They paid the highest price any person can be asked to pay, and prove the old saying that freedom isn’t free. But this reminder of selfless sacrifice brought to my mind an even greater sacrifice.

Jesus Christ told His disciples that “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”[Jn 15:13] But then He didn’t stop there. He continued, “You are My friends if you do what I command you.” It’s good to remember the cost required in the offer of “the free gift of God” [Ro 6:23]. As Paul says, the Christian has been “bought with a price” [1Co 6:20], and that at no small cost. Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, laid His perfect, blameless life down for us fallen wretches – “the just for the unjust” – that we might be redeemed [1Pe 1:18-19]. The wages of sin (i.e. the just compensation for it) is death [Ro 6:23], yet the only one to ever walk the face of this earth who didn’t deserve to die, voluntarily chose to sacrifice Himself to pay for our salvation. And while death on the cross was certainly a painful, torturous, humiliating way to die, that paled in comparison to the agony of bearing the perfectly just wrath of God that each and every human deserves [Ro 3:23]. The grace offered us is not the “cheap grace” so palatable to the world, but rather a “costly grace”, as Bonhoeffer would say [1].

It can be easy to not grasp that cost in a culture that tends to view God as some old grandfatherly figure who should simply exist to spoil the kids (and if He doesn’t fit that silly image, then He probably doesn’t exist). After all, “‘God is love’, right? And how could He not love someone like me?” But this distorted view of God ignores the fact that we are all lawbreakers on death row, in desperate need of a pardon. And so the Gospel, literally the “good news”, doesn’t seem like such good news because we never grasped how bad our situation is. A right understanding of the Law that condemns us helps us understand why we need salvation, and why Jesus’ sacrifice was the only way to provide that salvation such that God could still be just while also the justifier of sinners like us [Ro 3:26].

As a time of solemn remembrance of the weighty sacrifice of others on our behalf passes by, it is good to remember the fragility of such human sacrifices and the endurance of Christ’s sacrifice, once for all [He 7:27]. The U.S. President Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.”[2] Sadly, the greatest sacrifices soldiers (or any other human) can make may all come to naught, despite the best intentions, the best training, the most careful planning, the boldest action, and the most heroic effort. Sometimes, our best effort simply isn’t enough to win the day. Other times, the success hard-won by those deadly sacrifices is undone by the foolish actions of others afterward. Those times are painful reminders of our own finitude, both in terms of power and wisdom. But Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient, complete, and impossible to undo. His victory over sin and death is unparalleled, truly epic in achievement, and confirmed by His resurrection from the dead. And yet, it is not just some distant story of past derring-do, passed down to you to think about once a year. It is a sacrifice made that you personally – right here, right now, may live – joyfully reconciled with your Creator in this life, and resurrected to be with Him for all eternity. Don’t let another year go by without considering the supreme sacrifice made on your behalf by Christ Jesus, and accepting His gift of life and His calling to be a disciple.

Last week’s post was about worship of God “in spirit and truth” as Jesus phrased it. But there is an objection from skeptics to God desiring worship. They say the desire for worship on the part of God, and particularly the command for us to worship Him, is petulant, arrogant, needy, egotistical, and so on. Do they have a case? Let’s work through that today.

The main problem I see with this line of reasoning is that they seem to be objecting to a perceived lack of warrant, or justification, for worship. But this is because the god they object to is too little of a god, so to speak. Like the strawman fallacy, where one creates a caricature of your opponent’s view to pick apart and easily defeat, the skeptic has made a “straw god” to be disgusted with. It would, indeed, be the height of arrogance for a mere man to demand worship as God; no matter how amazing or powerful or smart he was, he would still be, without a doubt, unqualified for that role. But that’s not the God I serve.

The God of the Bible is distinctly and uniquely qualified to be worshiped. God is everything we consider to be praiseworthy. For example, we might praise the gracious and persistent love of a parent for their child even when the child rebels and hates the parent; yet God demonstrated His love for us in that He loved us before we could love Him [Rom 5:8,10, 1Jn 4:19]. We might praise the self-sacrifice of the soldier that gives his life to save his comrades; yet Christ gave His life as a sacrifice for all [Rom 5:6-8, 1Jn 4:10]. We might praise the judge who stands up against a corrupt system and refuses to be bought off with bribes, but rather punishes the guilty and releases the innocent that was unjustly charged; yet God is perfectly just [Deut 10:17, Ro 2:11]. He is all of these things and more, to the nth degree. Does this mean that God is subservient to independent behavioral standards then? On the contrary, we have these ideas of exemplary moral conduct because they are grounded in the unchanging nature of God.

All others are not qualified to receive worship. Some skeptics charge that demanding worship is indicative of the most unpraiseworthy of humans: megalomaniacs, malevolent dictators, psychopaths and so on. So why would we consider that behavior good when God demonstrates it? I would simply note that we are repulsed by humans craving worship because we recognize they are all unworthy of being worshiped, whether they desire it or not. They are not actually omnipotent, omniscient, or even the greatest thing since sliced bread. In attempting to lay claim to something they have no right to, they seek to steal glory from God.

God has the right to worship. If some stranger walked up to you and demanded that you salute them when they approached, you might reasonably take offense at that assumption of superiority on their part. But suppose you are a soldier in your nation’s military, in uniform, on duty at your base, and the stranger approaching you was the base commander. Even if you don’t know him personally or even recognize him, the symbols of far higher rank on his uniform mean that he has the right to your respect and your obedience. And if you do recognize him and just don’t like him, that doesn’t really matter. You are still obligated to salute because of his position of authority over you. Of course, you don’t have to salute; but you should probably expect to pay the consequences if you don’t. The skeptic objecting to God’s command to worship Him is treating God like the random stranger walking up and making the same demands – “How rude! Who do you think you are?” But God isn’t a random peer – He is our Creator, and He is sovereign over us, like it or not. You can object to His authority. You can refuse to respect, honor, glorify, and love Him – even though these would be the only reasonable responses if you understood who He was and what He’s done – but there are consequences to that choice.

Lastly, praising God and worshiping Him is simply acknowledging what is true. Truth is correspondence with reality, and if God really is loving, merciful, just, holy, sovereign – and if we desire to be truthful – then it is only right that we acknowledge those statements about God.

Gary Parrett described worship as our faithful response to God’s gracious revelation. His revealing of Himself to us warrants the response we call worship, whether that take the form of trembling, reverential awe, or exuberant, joyful praise, or deeply quiet gratitude, or simple, obedient service. If you’re a skeptic, don’t miss out on being reconciled with your Creator, the one and only King of all, because you objected to a little god that was only a pretender to the throne.

A woman inquired of Jesus about the proper place to worship: was it the temple in Jerusalem, or Mount Gerazim where her people worshiped? This raises the larger question of what’s actually important in this activity of worshiping God. Does location matter? Time? What about form of worship? In His reply to her one issue, Jesus answered the bigger issue when He told her to worship “in spirit and in truth”, for those are the worshipers God seeks [Jn 4:23-24]. But what does that mean? Let’s work through that today.

First, Nelson’s Bible Dictionary defines worship as “the supreme honor or veneration given either in thought or deed to a person or thing.”[1] However, while it can be directed to anything or anyone, only God is actually worthy of worship. Let’s look at 5 distinctives of Christian worship.

We must worship “in spirit” because God is spirit; that is, He is immaterial. And He has created us humans with a spirit as well. We are far more than the sum of our physical body components. Our worship can not be reduced to simply chemical reactions or physical responses to stimuli. There is a relational interaction between our spirit and the Spirit of God that transcends location or language or communication skills. Reverend Watkins writes in Ellicott’s Commentary that “The yearning of the human spirit is that of a child seeking the author of his being.”[2] As Grudem points out, “genuine worship is not something that is self-generated or that can be worked up within ourselves. It must rather be the outpouring of our hearts in response to a realization of who God is.”[3]

While there is a mystical, spiritual component to our worship that may be expressed in a variety of ways, Christian worship is worship “in truth”. Therefore, it is also strongly propositional. It makes informative statements. It is not just some wishy-washy, make-it-up-as-you-go “spirituality” popular among many these days, but rather objective statements about God’s attributes, His actions in the world, and His work in the lives of His people. When we sing “Up from the grave He arose!”, we are making definite objective statements about Jesus’ actions in history. When we sing “Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty! God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!”, we are making objective statements about His nature. There’s no room for “true for you but not for me” relativism in Christian worship.

Worship “in truth” has real content. If your worship consists of making animal noises, I would argue that you’re not really worshiping. Or if your worship is only an emotional high, barely distinguishable from the feelings at Saturday night’s concert other than it’s on Sunday morning, I would encourage you to look a little deeper. Emotions are good, but Christian worship grounds those emotions in solid truth. There’s a saying that “We sing our theology”, and that should give us pause. In light of that, the Christian should always examine the words they sing to verify that they are truthful and correspond to what we know of God.

Worship “in truth” will correspond to who God is, for truth is correspondence to reality. Ellicott’s commentary on those verses in John says, “Worship which is ‘in truth’ is in harmony with the nature of the God whom we worship.”[2] Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament likewise says of this passage, “To worship in truth is not merely to worship in sincerity, but with a worship corresponding to the nature of its object.”[4] The Expositor’s Greek Testament adds that worship “is to be ἐν ἀληθείᾳ {en aletheia} – in correspondence with reality.”[5] In other words, we worship God as all-knowing, all-powerful, sovereign, and holy because He actually possesses those attributes. We don’t worship God as the sum total of the universe (pantheism) or as the Force from Star Wars (panentheism), because those propositions – those truth claims – do not correspond to reality.

Lastly, worship “in truth” should be free from hypocrisy. After all, hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another, which is the total opposite of corresponding to reality.

In summary, Christian worship is honoring God with our heart, soul, strength and mind, recognizing who He is, and responding appropriately. It is not limited by time or place, or status of the worshiper, or style of worship. It must be offered honestly and sincerely, not by rote, as a spiritual service to God and not to please man. For that is what God desires of us, and only that will ultimately satisfy creatures created to glorify God.

As I’m preparing this year for a big engineering exam, I am reminded of the benefit of deadlines. Yes, I said benefit. As much as I hate the pressure of a deadline, whether it’s on a regular project at work or my upcoming exam, I have to admit, it’s better to have a deadline. The procrastinators out there may disagree at first, but I speak as one of you. And if you’re like me, and have procrastinated and gotten burned before, you know deep down that having an indefinite amount of time to accomplish something is the worst gift we can receive. As I can readily attest, studying can just be blown off too easily without a set goal or deadline, but having a test date set motivates us to study like nothing else. The need to study suddenly becomes very real. As I’m watching videos from a review course, and working through practice problems on my weekends now, and collecting reference books I was missing, and highlighting and underlining and tabbing my books like mad, I’m wishing I’d been this motivated over the last several years! But as important as this exam is to me, this all pales in comparison to the critical importance of being reconciled with God. The Bible warns us that it is appointed once for man to die, then the judgement [Heb 9:27-28]. Sadly, that is one deadline that we often go out of our way to ignore. It’s hard to fix a problem we don’t recognize, so let’s work through two potentially disastrous responses to life’s most important deadline.

Although scientific giant Blaise Pascal lived almost 400 years ago, he diagnosed modern American culture pretty well. He wrote in his Pensées about two dangerous responses to God: diversion and indifference. Although some of the diversions are different now, we still choose to busy ourselves with anything imaginable rather than to think about death or examine our lives. Between our jobs and/or school, and our hobbies, and social media and TV, and encouraging our kids to play on 3 different sports teams at the same time while in band and 10 different after-school activities, we don’t have a minute a day that isn’t filled with hustle and bustle. And though we complain about how busy we are, we actually want the busyness, for it keeps us from contemplation. But, as Pascal warns, “diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”[1] No matter what we fill our days with, we must fill them with something, lest we have time to think, and, as philosopher Peter Kreeft puts it, “look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it. “[2] Man’s solution is to not think about it – “ostrich epistemology” as Kreeft calls it.

But there is also that second pitfall: indifference. The diverted person is too distracted to even notice his car is about to run off a cliff until it is too late; the indifferent see the danger but don’t care. Pascal rightly observes, “The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us, and which touches us so profoundly, that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing what it is.”[3] And again, “Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.”[4] Or as Kreeft puts it, “We are more put out at missing a parking place than at missing our place in Heaven”. [5] Whether this indifference is manifested in a hedonism that says “let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die”, or a nihilistic apathy that asks “what’s the point of caring?”, or an arrogant skepticism that says “I glanced at that and promptly dismissed it since it would interfere with the way I want to live”, it is just as inexcusable. If you’ve lived very long on this earth, you’ve known friends and family who haven’t. Death is one certainty in life, and it doesn’t take long to see that it can come to each of us at any time. Sicknesses, accidents, wars, natural disasters, malicious or negligent actions of others like robbers or drunk drivers – the list of ways we can meet our physical death is long, and nobody can predict how much time they will have. Therefore, it behooves us to make wise use of the time given us, and not put off this critical investigation until tomorrow, when tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us.

Dr. Kreeft, reflecting on Pascal’s longer treatment of these two dangers, warns that “Diversion and indifference are the devil’s two most successful weapons against faith and salvation, the two widest roads to Hell in today’s world.”[6] They are paths of no resistance, for the first blocks the victim’s view of the danger, and the second dulls the perception of it. But just as diversion and indifference are not reasonable courses of action for me preparing for my exam, neither are they reasonable paths to follow when it comes to your eternal destiny. As Pascal said, “[T]here are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all of their heart because they know Him and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know him.”[7] Listen then, to reason, and seek God while He may be found [Is 55:6-7].

Note: The Pensées (“thoughts” in French) are fragments of Pascal’s uncompleted magnum opus, and were left unorganized at his death at the age of only 39. Different editions organize them differently. If you get a book based on the Krailsheimer numbering, use the reference below with a K. The Brunschvicg numbering is indicated by a B.
[1] Pascal Pensées 171 (B), 414 (K).
[2] Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées – Edited, Outlined, & Explained (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 168.
[3] Pensées, 194 (B), 427 (K)
[4] ibid., 198 (B), 632 (K)
[5] Kreeft, p. 203.
[6] Kreeft, p. 188.
[7]Pascal, 194 (B), 427 (K)

Have you walked away from God because you think He let you down? I’ve noticed in several “deconversion” stories a common thread of feeling “let down”, whether by unanswered prayers or the more general “problem of evil” that tends to assume that God can’t exist because of the presence of so much evil and suffering in the world. This past Sunday, one of the songs in church had the refrain “He’s never gonna let, never gonna let me down”[1]. What does that mean? And do the testimonies of those who clearly felt God did let them down (and concluded that God either doesn’t exist at all or doesn’t exist as portrayed in the Bible) undermine that encouraging lyric? Let’s work through that objection today.

What are some reasons people give for thinking God has let them down? Sick or seriously injured family members who died despite fervent prayers is a common one. Praying for relief from abusive situations, (often, sadly, at the hands of those who call themselves Christians) is another example I’ve read. How we define our terms will go a long ways toward determining whether we feel let down by God in those situations. But first, let’s look at some examples of people who have gone through really tough times and who didn’t come away thinking God had failed them, and see if there is anything to learn from them.

In 2017, at the age of only 34, Nabeel Qureshi, a former Muslim turned Christian apologist, died from stomach cancer after a protracted battle. He and many Christians, myself included, prayed for his healing, but it didn’t happen. Did God let him down? No.

In 2015, the terrorist group ISIS made the news with their video of 21 Coptic Christians being beheaded after refusing to deny Christ. Did God let them down? In spite of the lack of miraculous intervention, no, God did not let them down.

In the mid-20th century, when Romanian atheist-Jew-turned-Christian-pastor Richard Wurmbrand was jailed and tortured for 14 years, did God let him down? No. Or when Bulgarian atheist-turned-Christian-pastor Haralan Popov was jailed and tortured for over 13 years, had God abandoned him? Hardly. Rather they said it was God who sustained them.

Corrie ten Boom, and her sister Betsy, were sent to Nazi concentration camps in WWII. Betsy died there shortly before Corrie was released. Did God fail Corrie in not delivering her sister? Not according to Corrie.

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs tells the stories of many, many Christians over the centuries killed for their faith, like the Christians being burned alive as human torches in Emperor Nero’s gardens in the opening artwork above. And yet they didn’t consider themselves abandoned even then.

Consider the apostle Paul, who counted all his previous accomplishments and credentials as rubbish compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus [Php 3:8], but got flogged, beaten, imprisoned, stoned, shipwrecked, and finally beheaded [2Cor 11:25]. No prosperity gospel for him…

If anyone could claim God had let them down, Job, who is the archetype for endurance of suffering, could surely say that. Yet this “blameless” man, after losing his family, his possessions, and being covered in boils, could still say “though He slay me, I will hope in Him.” [Job 13:15]

These people understood what many in our culture today have a hard time understanding: the character of God. We tend to think of God as some doting grandpa looking for every opportunity to give us whatever cool toys our hearts desire. And when that doesn’t happen, we may begin to doubt that He loves us or that He even exists. But that’s not what the Bible teaches. Yes, God is more loving than we could ever be, but He is also more just, and holy, and perfect, than we could ever be. He is sovereign, and all-knowing. In fact, He is the only being worthy of worship. And He doesn’t live for us; rather, we live for Him. Until we recognize that, passages like Acts 9:16, where God says He “will show this man (Paul) how much he must suffer for My name’s sake”, won’t make much sense. Neither will the passages in almost every book of the New Testament that speak of the suffering Christians will endure if they follow Christ faithfully. If we think God’s purpose for us is for us to be happy or comfortable, then we’ll be disappointed a lot. After all, “Into each life some rain must fall”[2], as Longfellow would say. For some, the rain seems to never stop falling. However, as Longfellow aptly pointed out, “Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.” The presence of misery in our lives no more refutes God’s existence than storm clouds deny the sun’s existence. But if we recognize, like the apostle Paul did, that God’s purpose is for us to glorify Him, then we’ll be able to say with Paul that this “momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” [2Cor 4:17] And that’s a significant statement given the afflictions that he endured.

While we tend to use the term “unanswered” prayer, the reality is that God’s answer isn’t what we wanted, whether that’s a “no,” or “not yet,” or something else besides “yes.” And the history of Christianity is filled with people not being delivered from their trials and, oftentimes, their tortured deaths; but it’s also filled with testimonies of God strengthening, comforting, and even giving peace and joy, in the midst of some of the most evil circumstances mankind has dreamt up. Did God let any of those people down? From the world’s perspective, it might appear so. But the Christian knows better. For the Christian knows he is called to be a faithful witness of God in every situation [1 Cor 10:31, 2Cor 5:20-21], and God’s light shines bright in the darkest places.

The 9.1 magnitude Japan earthquake of 2011, as recorded at the Hokkaido Station seismograph.

A colleague and I were talking the other day about the difficulties in conveying the dangers of rare events to people. The site conditions for projects we were each working on had triggered some seismic provisions that can be very costly to design for, and to build. Unfortunately, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other relatively rare events are easy to blow off… until they happen to you. Who wants to spend money or time preparing for something that is (in their mind) unlikely to happen in their lifetime? Especially when it’s going to cost a lot? It doesn’t help that our part of the world has the potential for a high magnitude earthquake (M7.0+), but hasn’t had one in just over 200 hundred years. While it’s good that major earthquakes are rare here, one bad side effect is apathy and an unspoken rule of “out of sight, out of mind”. This tendency to not appreciate danger that is perceived as distant or unlikely to occur isn’t just an obstacle for engineers trying to justify their fees to clients. People often have the same mindset when it comes to spiritual matters, and that’s what I’d like to work through today.

We’ll wear helmets on our bikes and seat belts in our cars because of the dangers of vehicle accidents; we’ll put non-slip treads on stairs because of the potential for falls; we’ll put nets and cushions around trampolines because of accidents there; we’ll even stop eating things we like and start eating things we hate to stave off various diseases – we’ll take all sorts of precautions to protect our frail physical lives that are often here today and gone tomorrow despite our best efforts, but we won’t look to the safety of our eternal souls. Isn’t that an odd ordering of priorities? Small dangers can loom large in our view while much greater dangers are perceived as unimportant. And yet, none of us are guaranteed our next breath, much less the next day/month/year/decade. Death, that heavy curtain we just can’t see past, can close on us at any time. But that is actually just the short-term danger. For the Bible tells us some of what is beyond that black curtain: judgement, but not on our terms.

I’ve heard some people say that that if they died and found themselves in the presence of the God they had denied all these years, they would surely demand that He justify His actions throughout human history to them – as if they weren’t less than a speck of dust before His might that created the universe out of nothing, as if they weren’t a moral cesspool in comparison to His perfect goodness, as if they weren’t the intellectual equivalent of a bacterium in comparison to His omnipotence and wisdom [Ro 9:20, Ps 103:14, Isa 45:9, Dan 4:35]. I pray they realize the arrogance and folly of their statements before that hypothetical scenario becomes reality for them, because that trial scene will be very one-sided, and it won’t be them asking the questions. Indeed, we will all appear before God one day [Heb 9:27], on God’s terms. What does that mean? It means that perfection is the standard to meet [Rom 3:23, Dt 32:4]. It means that we will answer for every word and deed and thought [Mt 12:36, Heb 4:12-13]. It means that if we can’t meet that standard, then we need a proxy – a substitute – who can, and is willing to, take our place and represent us before the judgement seat of God. That one is Jesus Christ [Jn 1:29, 2Co 5:21, 1Tim 2:5-6].

Don’t make the mistake of protecting yourself from the little things that can only affect this life, and neglect the real possibility of entering eternity without having reconciled with your Creator (and Judge) on His terms. Just as many of the earthquakes of the past came when people least expected, you could find yourself standing before God in the blink of an eye. Make the investment now that will make that meeting an occasion of joy rather than terror.

Have you ever watched a movie where one lawyer objects to every question the other lawyer asks a witness? The multitude of objections doesn’t mean they’re valid, though, as evidenced by the judge’s response of “overruled” on many (or all) of them. You can run into a similar situation in discussions about God with skeptics. I’ll give you an example I’ve run into in the past. I’ve been on the receiving end of what I call “shotgun skepticism”, where the skeptic fires off a barrage of objections to try to overwhelm their opponent and end the discussion before it’s even started. You’ll see things like “400 contradictions in the Bible”, or “50 reasons why Christianity is obviously false.” What do you do when you get confronted by something like that? Let’s work through that today.

It can be intimidating when you are presented with what appears to be a wall of objections for why you are wrong, but you have to remember that someone’s objection doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a good reason behind the objection. Like the judge in court, you have to simply examine each objection one by one, and judge them on their own merit, not on the total quantity. And here’s the thing: when you actually start examining these mass quantity type objections, you’ll find that many of them are non-issues. Below are 3 types of objections that turn out to be more bark than bite.

The false objection. Some objections are just plain wrong. I remember getting one from a friend years ago that claimed to be hundreds of contradictions in the Bible. However, when I started looking through them, some of the references simply didn’t say what the objection claimed. The objection looked intimidating at face value, until I started examining the individual parts of it, where it started to fall apart. Were there ones that were fair questions? Sure, but several of the hundreds of alleged biblical errors were themselves errors. Most of the rest fell into the next two categories.

The irrelevant objection. These are statements that raise an issue unrelated to the matter at hand. It may be a legitimate question to seek answers for, but it’s not a reason to reject the particular issue being discussed. For instance, an objection to God’s existence because “Christians are hypocrites” is simply irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. Every Christian on the planet could be a lying, thieving, murderous hypocrite, and that would only demonstrate our failure as humans, not God’s nonexistence. Likewise, claiming we can safely ignore the Bible because of apparent contradictions in it may call into question the inerrancy of the Bible, but not the truthfulness of the individual claims made in it. For instance, the Bible affirming two truly contradictory statements might show it to have genuine errors (due to the law of non-contradiction), but as long as the statements that all humans are sinners [Ro 3:10,23] and God will judge us [Ec 12:14, 2Co 5:10] are both true, then the skeptic has a serious problem to deal with, regardless of what else is true or false. In fact, he’d better hope that John 3:16 is also true so there is a solution to that major problem. You see, all the rest of the Bible could be wrong, but if those statements are true, then there is a critical problem the skeptic needs to recognize, and an amazing solution he needs to accept in order to survive.

The misunderstood objection. Among the several lists of alleged inconsistencies and contradictions I was given by my friend a while back were things like “God asked Adam where he was… but God is omnipresent.” OK… God’s omnipresence doesn’t mean He can’t ask someone where they are. As most parents are aware, you can still ask a question of your guilty kids already knowing full-well what happened. The question isn’t for your enlightenment, but rather for the child to have an opportunity to do the right thing and confess to the wrongdoing. The person raising objections like this has misinterpreted the passage objected to, either innocently or deliberately. If innocently done, the response may be as simple as clarifying the passage for them. If done maliciously, there are likely some difficult underlying issues driving the person to try to interpret passages in the worst possible manner to bolster their rejection of God. Be patient, and speak the truth in love, methodically dismantling the barricades they’ve erected between them and God.

Oftentimes, skeptics take the approach that the best defense is a good offense, and try to overwhelm you with quantity of objections; but remember that when it comes to logic and clear thinking, quality really does beat quantity. In fact, ask the skeptic to pick their single best objection to discuss. Sometimes you’ll find that they didn’t actually look through their list they forwarded or copied and pasted into a reply to you! Those are good opportunities to teach them the importance of examining their own beliefs rather than just parroting a Dawkins or Hitchens (or whatever internet site they could find in under a minute that supported their view). Make them pick one objection that they are prepared to defend. Remember that if they make make a positive claim, then they do bear a burden of proof. Despite the constant attempts to say the Christian bears the full burden of defending themselves, that’s actually not how it works. If they refuse to pick a claim to defend, you can always stop there. If they are willing to make statements but unwilling to back them up, then they’re likely not really interested in seeking the truth. But of course, we go the extra mile for those we love, and the skeptic is a person in desperate need of salvation, just as much as I or any other Christian was. So if they only want to continue talking if you engage their hundreds of fallacious objections, then I recommend picking off the easy ones that are actually misstatements first, then deflect the ones that don’t apply to the topic at hand, and focus on clarifying the remaining misunderstandings, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are sincere misunderstandings. It can be a long trying process working with people that are peppering you with blasts of shotgun skepticism while you try to help them, but these are people that Christ died for [Jn 3:16], who may yet be used by God in bigger ways than I can ever imagine when I’m talking to them. And that’s worth working through a few (hundred) objections.

“Let me sharpen my pencil and see if we can’t make that beam size work with the extra load the owner wants.” What does sharpening pencils have to do with designing beams? That’s simply an old expression in engineering regarding the need for greater accuracy in some particularly critical calculations. We tend to use a lot of approximations and rules of thumb that we know are not exact but will err on the side of caution. While a safe design is our duty to the public; a safe design produced in a timely manner makes for happy clients and keeps us in business. But sometimes, those typical procedures and quick approximations result in a design that doesn’t meet some project requirement. And while computers have replaced nomographs and graphical analysis methods – and the need to keep a sharp point on one’s pencil to get a more accurate result – we still use that expression to signify when the situation warrants a more detailed design. Back in the days of solving something by drawing similar triangles, the method – pencil and paper and straightedge – was often the limiting factor on our accuracy. Now, computerized methods allow us to be as accurate as we could ever need, so sharpening the pencil now is more about our assumptions. Did I assume a higher typical load than what is actually present on the current project? Did I use a simpler formula that doesn’t account for various load reductions or strength increases that actually could be applied to my current project? However, sometimes, in sharpening the pencil and wading into the details, we find that a particular situation isn’t quite as similar to past projects as we thought, and our assumptions we thought were conservative are actually overlooking critical factors. And that’s an issue I see outside of engineering as well.

One’s eternal fate is of critical importance. No one is promised their next breath, so where you’ll be a few minutes after your last breath, whenever it comes, is not something you want to miscalculate. What assumptions are you making that you need to revisit?

“The idea of God is outdated stone-age superstition and simply unnecessary now.” Regardless of how old the idea of God is, that doesn’t make it unnecessary. We still need an explanation for the world around us, and scientific observation can only go so far. You can scientifically measure water boiling all day long and precisely explain how it’s boiling, and never explain why it’s boiling if you’re unwilling to admit that somebody put the kettle of water on the stove and turned it on.

“Science will answer everything someday.” The idea that science is the silver bullet to all our problems has a problem of its own: not all questions (and their answers) are scientific in nature. Metaphysical questions about the meaning of life and ethics are on the “ought” side of the ought-is dilemma, outside the scope of science, which can only observe what is, and not how it ought to be.

“Science has explained away God.” This idea that explaining the mechanics of our world does away with the need for God is a common assumption today, but this is akin to thinking one has explained the origin of a car by explaining how it works. The scientific method has allowed us to advance our knowledge of the mechanical workings of our world tremendously, but it is useless in a universe not governed by causality and logic. Our universe exhibits an organization that is best explained by a Master Designer. Indeed, modern science was based on the idea that the universe could be investigated and understood because God had created it in an orderly manner conducive to study.

“Religion just causes arguments and isn’t worth thinking about.” Maybe you’ve assumed that discussions about religion are just a waste of time and a needless source of feuding. But what’s the real problem there? Is it the subject matter, or the way we discuss it? Maybe civility and sound reasoning are the solution, and not indifference. Suppose you and I have gone for a flight in a mutual friend’s airplane. Beautiful, wide-open countryside passes below his Cessna 182 as we bask in the view. But then our friend passes out at the yoke. Now we are left with a very serious problem: what went up will eventually come down, one way or another. To make matters worse, we have very different ideas of how to fix the problem. But does our disagreement mean we should simply ignore the entire question of how to revive our pilot friend and/or land the plane? No! The problem remains even if we ignore it. In fact, it’s likely getting worse with each passing second. Likewise, the question of whether God exists, what we can know about Him, and what He may want of us are some of the biggest questions we can ask in life. No part of our lives are unaffected by the answers to this issue, and the urgency of finding the answer only grows the more we ignore it.

If any of those initial assumptions described your thoughts on the matter, I’d like to kindly suggest it’s time to sharpen your pencil and work through that problem again, my friend. But “time waits for no man”, and like the ground filling more and more of the Cessna’s windshield, “the God question” can only be put off for so long before it’s too late.

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Richard Dawkins’ objections to Christianity here, but some of his bad reasoning got regurgitated by another atheist in a book I’m wading through right now, so it seems fitting to address this issue now. This common atheist objection to religion in general is that religion is merely a cultural phenomenon. In other words, I’m simply a Christian because I grew up in a Christian culture, and would most likely be Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist if I’d grown up elsewhere in the world. Is that a legitimate point? Let’s work through that this week.

First off, let’s make sure we have the objection correct. Here’s two quotes, the first from a relative newcomer on the atheist publishing scene, David Madison, and the second from Dawkins himself.

“[I]f I had been born in Croatia instead of Indiana, I would have been taught that another religion is the only one that is worthy of my full devotion. In one of the more memorable confrontations between Richard Dawkins and a devout Christian during a Q& A session, the gentleman claimed to have a personal relationship with Jesus. Dawkins bluntly pointed out that the fellow would not even have been a Christian if he’d been raised in another culture or another era. Instead of believing in Jesus, he might believe in Thor, Wotan, or Allah.”
– David Madison [1]

Lest you think Madison’s recounting of Dawkins’ Q&A dialogue was simply an off-the-cuff remark by Dawkins made without thinking it through beforehand, the following is from Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion”, which one would hope had involved some careful review prior to publishing.

“If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.” – Richard Dawkins [2]

Now, does this actually help the atheist? Not really. For one thing, the fact that other cultures may have opposing beliefs does nothing to invalidate the Christian’s beliefs. The most Dawkins could say from that fact alone is that they can’t both be true (if actually contradictory). In that case, one would indeed have to be wrong, but the atheist is assuming both are wrong, which just doesn’t follow. Secondly, this appears to be an example of the genetic fallacy, where the origin of a belief is attacked rather than the actual content of the belief. I did learn about Christianity from my parents, my church, and the general culture around me here in the “Bible Belt” of the US. But as long as that knowledge I received was true, then it doesn’t matter where it came from. That’s the thing about truth – it’s objective and independent of the messenger.

But what strikes me as the bigger issue is that Dawkins undercuts many of his fellow atheists with this attack. We could just as easily say that atheists in communist China aren’t atheists because of reason or “progress”, but only because that happens to be what is promoted in their culture. On the flip side, many of the atheists parroting Dawkins’ delusion (like Madison) are here in the US, which is still a predominantly Christian nation. Their own existence as members of an atheist minority in a majority “Christian” nation also demonstrates that people’s beliefs are not determined by their culture. By Dawkins’ own reasoning American atheists should be Christians (or at the very least, theists), but they aren’t. They made a choice in spite of the dominant culture around them.

Can one’s culture be a contributing factor? Certainly. If you are only presented with certain choices by your culture, then you are more likely to pick from the choices given. But even that is no guarantee. Some countries over the last century have tried to enforce state atheism and actively persecuted believers. These included the former Soviet states, the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, Communist China today, and Albania, the country that declared itself the “world’s first atheist state” in 1967. They all actively punished and often executed religious believers. And yet people still chose to believe in God in spite of that societal pressure. My own mom used to write to a woman who was imprisoned in Russia for being a Christian. Muslims have been converting to Christianity in the Middle East in growing numbers the last few years, also in spite of very heavy societal pressure not to, which has included being disowned by one’s family, being jailed for years, or being beheaded by ISIS (among others). While one’s surrounding culture may influence our beliefs, it clearly does nothing to support or refute the truth of a particular belief.

As an aside, is it “indoctrination” to pass on one’s beliefs to your children? Well, technically, indoctrination is simply “theactof indoctrinating, orteachingorinculcatingadoctrine,principle,orideology,especiallyonewithaspecificpointofview.”[3] Kinda like atheists teaching their kids that science is the only way to know truth (This is called a self-defeating statement. Just ask by what scientific test one arrives at that conclusion. But I digress…) It’s actually pretty cumbersome to teach anything without some specific point of view. The real issue is whether the doctrine being taught is true or not. If it is, then we shouldn’t shy away from that, but rather seek to teach that.

In closing, I did grow up in a Christian home, and my faith does happen to be the same faith of my parents. But Christianity does not recognize belief by proxy. My parents’ beliefs will not save me, so it is still on me (and you) to decide, regardless of what our parents or peers believe. Every person who will be saved must make that decision for themselves. Moreover, mere lip service, “going through the motions”, or performing rituals without any understanding of them and without sincerity of heart (i.e. “just repeat these words after me”) are repeatedly condemned in the Bible. Saving faith requires knowledge of the truth of the Gospel, belief that it is true, and trust in Christ’s sufficient work, regardless of culture or geography.

Oftentimes as an engineer, my solution to a client’s problem isn’t what they wanted to hear: a building owner (or his architect) may have a daring, grand, idealistic vision of their building that the laws of physics simply won’t permit. And so structural engineers sometimes have to be the bearers of bad news. Of course, in the long run, their building not falling down and killing them is actually pretty good news, in my humble opinion. Occasionally, clients have much more realistic expectations, and I get the opportunity to exceed those expectations. They’re hoping for a bearable solution to one problem, and I get to help solve multiple problems. Those are good times that remind me of what I love about engineering.

The Jews had a similar “down to earth” expectation of what their Messiah would be. If you’re not familiar with Church lingo, “Messiah” comes from the Hebrew word for “Anointed One”. And while many think of the word “Christ” as being part of Jesus’ name, it’s actually just the Greek word for that same title. Christ and Messiah are synonymous. Now, to be clear, it’s not so much that the Jews had low expectations, per se – they just didn’t didn’t have high enough expectations. God’s plan was so much bigger than anything they were anticipating, that many didn’t even recognize it. Even with the clarity of hindsight, many today still don’t. The Jews were looking for a bold, triumphant solution to one problem – oppression of their nation (by the Romans at that point) – while Jesus brought the bolder, but humbler, solution for the problem of all humanity. They wanted the conquering hero riding in to Jerusalem on a war horse, not the sacrificial “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”, riding in on the foal of a donkey [Jn 1:29, Mt 21:6-11]. Even Jesus’ disciples, after the resurrection, were still stuck on this idea of restoring the kingdom of Israel rather than the Kingdom of God [Act 1:6]. How sad it would be for all of us Gentiles (non-Jews) if God had given them the merely localized, national salvation they wanted. But instead, He sent Jesus to free all who will receive Him: Jew and Greek, men and women, citizens and slaves, kings and peasants – even Americans like me! And this freedom is not some temporary thing that can be taken away by the next empire to rise up; Christians from the catacombs of ancient Rome to the prison camps of modern North Korea have experienced this freedom, even in their bondage. Rather than a divine King “dwelling” with His people like when God led the Israelites out of Egypt, we have the Holy Spirit residing in each Christian believer [1 Cor 6:19-20].

However, God’s good news of salvation can sometimes sound like bad news to our sin-plugged ears. Like the building owner or contractor who wants the project engineer to say “yes” to some requested deviation from the plans, we don’t like the idea of submission or obedience, or limitations on our supposed freedoms by God. We think, in our insecurity, that we’ll be cheated by God. And yet, He takes our “freedom” that is actually nothing more than enslavement to sin, and gives us true freedom [Jn 8:32,36]: freedom from fear of our circumstances[Ps 56:11]; freedom from the fear of death now, and ultimately from death itself [1Cor 15:54-57]; freedom to love and serve God as we simply could not do on our own [1Cor 2:14, Heb 11:6]; but most importantly, freedom to bring glory to God, which is actually what we were designed to do. As long as we run from our Creator and His solution to our problem, we will always be falling short of our true, ultimate purpose in life.

But we can trust the omniscient One who “sees the end from the beginning” [Is 46:9-10]. In spite of the temptation to think (in our arrogant finitude) that “if I were God, I would do such-and-such”, His ways really are better. I can’t really fault Israel for underestimating God: it seems pretentious to hope for as much as God has lavished on us. As Paul wrote, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” [Ro 11:33] Indeed, understanding that His perfect plan will far exceed our expectations, we can truthfully say with Paul, “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.” [Eph 3:20]

Have there been times in your life where you’ve only seen how God was working in hindsight? Have you gone through bleak trials and come out on the other side knowing that the trial, though unwanted, was the best thing for you in the end? It’s been said that God desires our holiness rather than our comfort, and that getting us there may be an uncomfortable, though necessary, process. Have you gone through that molding process and, looking back, realized the wisdom of God’s ways over ours? Something to chew on this this week. 🙂